Denver Comic Con hosts 61,000 ner… people for 2013 event

More than 45,000 flooded the convention floor for the Denver Comic Con June 2, 2013 at the Colorado Convention Center. The convention ended its three day marathon with an appearance by William Shatner. (John Leyba, The Denver Post)

Wow. That is a lot of nerds. And I was one of them.

This year’s Denver Comic Con topped out of 61,000 visitors, way more than the 47,000 event officials originally predicted hours after the final day June 2.

In fact, that 61,000 figure is more than double the amount who turned out for the 2012 inaugural event when 27,700 costumed-con goers invaded the streets of downtown Denver.

Even more impressive, 61,000 is a little less than half the number of people, 130,000, who attended San Diego Comic Con last year, and that event was founded in 1970!

I talked to Charlie La Greca, co-founder of Denver Comic Con, who told me despite the obvious demand for the event in Colorado, he didn’t want it to grow too fast, too soon.

While 100,000 would-be attendees is not an outrageous thought for next year’s con, he said, that would be too many for the third year of the event. But, expanding to facilitate more than 61,000 people will most likely happen for 2014, he said.

Pretty safe to say Denver Comic Con is going to get keep getting bigger as more and more fans seek out the Mile High City to enjoy all things nerd.

The numbers make sense when you think about it. So many people showed up for the con on Friday, 6,000 had to be turned away by order of the fire marshal because they were not admitted quickly enough by staff. On the convention floor, isles were so compacted with people — some smelling more…interesting than others — there was no way to quickly get through.

And, while may fans were extremely bummed Stan Lee had to cancel because he was shooting his cameo for Amazing Spider-Man 2 in New York, which was the truth, William Shanter packed the main auditorium, so overflow rooms were used with his panel streaming live.

Damn it, Jim. What does it all mean?!

Well, you can be sure corporations and big-time celebrities are going to become aware of how popular this event is and how fast it has grown, meaning the organizers will probably be getting more calls from stars who are asking them if they, the big-time Hollywood star, may please be a part of Denver Comic Con.

6,000 were not turned away “because staff didn’t let them in fast enough,” 6,000 were turned away because the Fire Marshall felt the site area reserved had reached capacity at that time. We heard updates throughout the weekend as we hit 45k then 50k then 54k and convention management tried to rework line management on the spot to save angst for the attendees. I’ve calculated nearly 10,000 questions answered by six people at just one info booth over the weekend, so I’m pretty sure there were 60k attendees by turnstile count. Inflating numbers here does not help the con, there is no benefit to it when there is already a huge enough population growth that management was up at 6 a.m. on Sunday reworking line control to try to minimize attendee frustration. Silly conspiracy theories. 🙂

While I didn’t personally count every single person who came through the doors over the weekend, I did see, firsthand, lines wrapping around the convention center multiple times all three days. What’s more, that outside line was solid until it was announced walk-up tickets had been sold out.

Of course it’s important to remember that SDCC only has that small amount of people because there’s a limit. It’s the hottest ticket every year, with servers crashing and tens of thousands of people not getting tickets. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with “impressive” comparisons, Denver.